DELTARUNE Chapter 2 Orchestrated - Berdly & Smart Race Boss Battle

Berdly's theme and its variation in his boss fight are an interesting contrast. Toby fox has the first note used as a pick-up to the 1st beat, while in the fight it is the down beat. It's a little disorienting to the listener being shifted slightly. If we consider the theme to be more in line with Berdly's personality, then the battle theme can be interpreted to be Berdly acting not completely in character, as he is manipulated by Queen. Queen's theme is very classical/baroque sounding, with a hint of carnival, and I thought it would be cool to have the Smart Race portion of the track start more action/cinematic, but slowly transition toward more classical style music.

The Berdly portion of the track is coincidentally waltz style again. Perfect, since I just arranged Empty Town, and I think I got the instruments to sound even more natural and expressive. That being said, I only spent 5% of total work time on Berdly, because Smart Race is crazy…

I usually slow the orchestra down when the original is a chiptune, because it's usually too fast, but in this case I wanted to challenge myself to make the orchestra play just as fast. I settled at a blistering 145 mph (I mean bpm lol), just slightly down from the original's 150bpm. And I still have instruments play 1/16 notes. It's absolute madness! I knew this was possible to pull off after hearing the boss music in Final Fantasy VII: Remake translated to orchestra with increased speed! As the first fight with Berdly takes place on bumper cars on a track, I had F-Zero GX in my mind the entire time arranging this.

Even at this fast pace, I wanted to bring out the "classical/romantic" sound as I previously mentioned really show Queen's manipulation. I didn't really notice that her theme actually plays in the intro. I just thought it was just some flourish until I listened closely with my headphones. My unique approach here is that I arranged the orchestra section first without any percussion, like I was simply creating Mendelssohn-sounding music, but then later dropped in the percussion layer. Hope you enjoyed this technique because I am proud of how much nuance I put in the "performance." Different parts don't just play in harmonic chords, they have their own counterpoint melodies. I also probably did the most amount of "air conducting" to the music, just standing at my desk and waving my arms to feel each section come and go with the right emotion.

Deltarune Orchestrated will be available on iTunes/Spotify upon completion of the album.

MP3 and FLAC available for Patrons. ►   / thesecondnarrator  

Arrangement by Jeremiah Sun
Original Theme by toby fox

DELTARUNE Chapter 1&2 is currently free to download on PC and the Nintendo Switch!

Check out my friend's lego channel - another brick. LOL
   / @anotherbrick  

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